This week I acquired an ODroid U2, which is an Exynos4 (quad-core A9 at 1.7GHz each), 2GB RAM, and a massive heat-sink (which even has power supply for a fan).

I ran some ball-park compilation time benchmarks, comparing to the Chromebook, and the results are interesting. The ODroid with an SDCard (32GB Sandisk Ultra HC-1) is faster than the Chromebook with an external USB 3.0 / SATA hard-drive.

The test-suite and check-all results are statistically equivalent, but the build time is better because of the number of CPUs, but not twice better. Disk is more of an issue on the test-suite, which can be clearly seen above (-j2 for Chromebook, -j4 for ODroid, but same time).

My USB stick is not the best, so that doesn't mean much. Also, I can't get the ODroid to even recognize the SATA disk when I plug in because of the power it needs. So, we'll have to do with those numbers. I'm using the ODroid Ubuntu image (based on 13.04), which worked out of the box (except the SATA disk and HDMI).

I'll let the board run for a week at home (room temperature ~ 25C) as a buildbot, with the fan on all the time and see if it copes with constant load for such a long time. Pandas couldn't do that, Chromebooks can.

Since the ODroid U2 is a dev board, which has a small form-factor, can be turned on/off remotely and won't sleep when the lid is closed, has a decent Ethernet port (Chromebook's wired adapters are *horrible*, and having dozens of Wireless clients in the lab is just not possible), and don't have the risk of being turned off by someone else, like the Calxedas, I'd say that it might end up as the best buildbot yet. (The new XU is an Exynos5 octo-core monster, might be even better).

After the initial week load test, if all goes well, I want to bootstrap GCC and run some tests on it, so I'll be calling for volunteers to help me.

cheers,

--renato